Where to start? For hundreds of years, Muslim, Jewish and Christian Arabs lived amicably enough in their respective quarters in the ancient cities of the sprawling Ottoman Empire. Today, large swathes of the region are on fire while Gaza is, quite literally, a charnel house. The new nation of Israel, born in the ashes of genocide, is methodically driving the remaining Palestinians from their traditional lands, and threatens to slaughter those who don’t or can’t move. How does this happen? I don’t mean “What are the historical events that have led to this?” but the more pressing question: Why is it allowed to continue? Using free munitions airlifted from the US specifically for the explicit purpose of levelling and sterilising the narrow Gaza Strip into a moonscape, Israel is conducting the defining crime of the century according to its oft-stated plan.
On the face of it, its actions in starving, bombing, shelling, sniping, burning and bulldozing the entrapped and almost entirely defenceless 2.2million civilians of Gaza are a monumental crime against humanity yet it continues without let or hindrance, day after day, month after month. Why? We have the UN to prevent this sort of thing. If it were Arabs doing it to Jews, the screeches of horror would awaken the dead (although where brown people do it to black, as in Darfur, or black to black, as in Congo, nobody in the West pays much attention). Meantime, the US sits to one side, one hand wiping its tears over Israeli war crimes while the other hand busily signs export orders for more free bombs and bombers. Why?
In most parts of the world, anybody who publicly supports the Palestinian cause will be targeted as an antisemite, silenced and socially destroyed, if not imprisoned. Why? In the 1980s, I joined demonstrations against apartheid South Africa. That did not make me an anti-white racist yet when I condemn the proven apartheid system operating within the territories Israel controls (mostly illegally, and with two fists of iron), I am accused of being an antisemitic racist. Bizarre. Since the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was ousted by the covert efforts of a large number of very well organised and well-funded people, politicians the world over have panicked and gone to ground. All you hear from them is the sound of the lids of their rabbit holes slamming shut. Why? In the 2024 elections in the US, several pro-Palestinian representatives lost their primaries. Why? Australia’s nominally left wing government is totally paralysed, reduced to emitting occasional squeaks that, with the ear of faith, could count as criticism of the genocide but could also later be denied. Meanwhile, the right wing Liberal-National opposition positively drools when it hears the word “Israel.” Why? For foreign non-Jews, what is the attraction in this small and distant country of religious extremists and race-baiting child murderers?
The British (and secular Jewish) historian, Tony Judt (1948-2010) commented:
…it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state (NYT, 19 April 2006).
A few years earlier, he had characterised Israel (which he knew very well) as transforming itself into a “belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-state” but nobody seems to care. If you listen to John Mearsheimer or read his definitive study, he will say “That’s the effect of the Israel-Zionist lobby, that’s what they do” (much as I hate abbreviations, we’ll have to call it the IZL). As he describes it, the US and dozens of other governments march robotically to the drumbeat of this unseen machine. Despite the good intentions of the Nuremberg trials and the UN Charter of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions and the ICJ and the ICC and UN peace-keeping missions here, there and everywhere, Israel can, it seems, act like a pack of high-tech berserkers yet nobody lifts a finger because the IZL.
The word lobbyists apparently comes from people who used to hang around in the lobby of Britain’s Parliament in Westminster, hoping to grab passing MPs to impress their message on them. In Washington, there are about 12,000 registered lobbyists (20 for each member of Congress) but it’s thought that up to 100,000 operate “below the radar.” They represent every possible vested interest in the country such as gun owners, the pharmaceuticals industry, various military industries, health, finance, fossil fuels, agriculture, manufacturing, religious groups, universities, sport, tobacco, unions, on and on. The combined IZL is one of the biggest, wealthiest and most powerful, as well as the best-organised, best connected and most secretive. With a flick of its fingers, it gets what it wants, total support for Israel in all its activities and total hostility to any country or group or person Israel designates as enemies, i.e. anybody who isn’t 110% a committed Zionist. Now I’m no politician but if somebody came to me and said “You must support Israel at all times and in all possible ways,” I would tell him very sharply where to go and what to do when he got there.
This raises the question: Why are our elected representatives different? What is the nature of the steely grip of the Israel lobby over politicians in practically every western country that renders them impotent and paralysed? I have asked this question of dozens of influential people around the world but of the very few responses, not one was remotely plausible. Mearsheimer seems to think that describing the lobby’s influence tells us all we need to know about it but it does not. We want to know how it reaches its goal of turning our politicians into simpering glove puppets. What is the case Zionist lobbyists put to them that convinces them to fall into line? I would like somebody to put up a case to convince me I’m supporting the wrong side in this, that I should throw out my keffiyeh and start screaming “Death to the Arabs” while waving a blue and white flag. But nobody does, nobody ever says why. Nobody offers a coherent case for genocide, for ethnic cleansing or even for poking out our tongues at passing Palestinians.
Nobody ever says why the Palestinian population, who had lived there for thousands of years, should suddenly abandon their homes and fields, hand them without payment to a bunch of foreigners and flee with their crying children and old people to live in noisome camps with no hope of return and no future for their children. I firmly support human rights, especially of the down-trodden, and have spent a lot of time working for and with Aboriginal people in Australia. They have a very strong, recent moral and legal claim on this country, which immigrant Australians are slowly starting to recognise and rectify. But I have to say, if a group of them came to my house today and said “OK, gaddiya, this is our mob’s land so you gotta piss off,” I wouldn’t budge. On the moral and legal rights of the Jewish people to alienate the historical lives and property of the Palestinian people, all we hear is silence. Beyond muttering “God gave us this land,” nobody attempts to justify it. And this is the clue to the nefarious nature of the Israel-Zionist lobby.
First, we need a small digression. The revelations of the Wikileaks material and Edward Snowden’s dump of security programs should have alerted each and every citizen to what our governments are doing behind our backs. Today, the US totally controls practically all electronic communications on the planet because they have built spyholes in every electronic device and every program they can get their hands on. This why the US is trying to block Chinese companies like Huawei. They say it’s because Huawei may have installed back doors to steal your data but that’s just a story. The real reason is because they can’t get their own backdoors into the Chinese technology, and that drives them mad (also because Huawei is steadily putting a lot of them out of business). All big American tech companies cooperate to the limit with every suggestion put to them by the US national security state. There are no exceptions. But. And this is a very big BUT: Israel is totally integrated with the US NSA and with the US tech, military, spying, financial, nuclear and other industries.
In matters of spying, Israel and the US work together at all times and in all respects. Their cooperation is the same as, say, between the army and the air force in any other country: the various services wear different uniforms but that’s the end of their difference. When it comes to spying, a country’s military services are totally integrated. Similarly, Israel and the US work as one, spying non-stop on every person in the Middle East, and many other parts of the world, except that with the access they have been given and have taken, Israel also spies on the US to the same extent as the US spies on everybody else. Israel probably doesn’t have much interest in New Zealand although the US does so, if Mossad, the Israeli spy service, wants to know what pictures the youngest player in the Wanganui rugby team emailed to his girlfriend last Saturday night, they simply log in to the NSA servers and get it. It’s all there, stored, scanned and logged in Utah within seconds of him switching on his phone.
Does this matter? It doesn’t until it does, as former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer found out. In his term as NY Attorney General, Spitzer had gone after corruption in Wall St, earning him battalions of very wealthy, very well-connected and powerful enemies who objected to him poking through their soiled underwear. Since people were already saying he was heading to the White House, they decided to get rid of him. Using information gathered by US government spying programs, Spitzer’s own dirty underwear was paraded in public, showing he had been paying for high end prostitutes with his credit card (very stupid of him, but that’s lawyers). That was the end of Mrs Spitzer’s little boy, and a salutary lesson for the entire political establishment in the US and everywhere else: “Think twice, kiddo, coz we’ve got the dirt on you.”
Just to show the power and reach of the Israeli spy machinery, at present in Gaza and Lebanon, the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) arrest men in their thousands, strip them and screen them with facial recognition cameras. This is then cross-checked with their vast data bases on all things electronic in Palestine. If this shows a hit of any sort, however trivial and however far back (e.g. as a child, once photographed throwing stones at an IOF jeep), the prisoner is shackled, blind-folded and led away for “enhanced interrogation” (torture) and is often not seen again. Disposing of the bodies is not a problem; they can be run over by a tank and hidden in the rubble of Gaza with the greatest of ease. Israeli spy services have all data on every Palestinian going back to birth. This is 1984 on steroids – or should I say, on microchips – but by any objective standard, it is madness on wheels. The people who are running this are totally paranoid. Sensible people would never get involved. It has been going on for at least half a century, probably a lot longer, and has now taken complete control of discourse in Israel and among the power elite in the US. The US, of course, is totally behind it in every respect – well, except the bosses get annoyed when Israeli spies are caught poking through their dirty underwear.
The next point to note is this: while the US and Israeli spying agencies are like Siamese twins sharing the same bloodstream, they are also both joined at the hip with organised crime throughout the world. In her distressingly detailed account of the life and crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, Whitney Webb describes the liaison between the CIA-NSA and Mossad “intelligence” communities and transnational crime syndicates as “sordid.” It’s actually very much worse than that, but the point here is that while Epstein is now dead (almost certainly murdered in prison to keep him quiet), the vast international machinery of corruption of which he was but a single cog remains intact, quietly going about its business out of sight. The spymasters of the deep state learned from Epstein, and the operation he controlled has morphed into the 21st Century. Nobody else will ever be allowed to run such an enormous muck-collecting show in public, not least because all the dirt he was collecting for his sexual blackmail/spying business is now available in, of course, the NSA facility in Utah. Screening emails is also a lot cheaper than buying private jets for the Epsteins of this world to fly their clients to their private island to be filmed having a weekend of sordid, middle-aged and elderly sex (the thought of some of them on the job makes my skin crawl). The information is available, so they use it. If perchance the dirt isn’t available, if the target is actually an honest person, they arrange for their friends in organised crime to make some. These days, that’s dead easy. Just ask Mr Jeremy Corbyn.
Now we have the background to the Israel/Zionist lobby. This huge, immensely wealthy machine, headquartered in Tel Aviv, has tentacles in every country in the world where there are people who identify as Zionist, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Half its tentacles insinuate themselves into the very heart of government with the purpose of exerting control over all matters that touch on the Zionist project, while the other half are in such intimate contact with international organised crime that nobody can tell them apart. Was Epstein a respectable criminal or was he a sordid spy? Who can tell? In the US, there are perhaps hundreds of organisations, some of them genuine grass-roots affairs but many set up with the explicit purpose of advancing Israel’s interests as their members’ primary goal in life. They are expected to raise their own funds but if they can’t, and they seem to be helpful to the IZL, money flows in from unnamed donors via dozens of front organisations or from Israel itself. Many of them are registered as charities so that criticising them attracts the usual screeches of “antisemitism.”
How much money is involved? Untold. Wealth the envy of Croesus. AIPAC’s website shows that they spent $42million on the US election in 2024. It doesn’t show all the other money they spent on everything else but they were easily outdone by casino widow, Miriam Adelson, who gave $100million to Trump’s campaign (and even by searching that information on the web, my file in Utah has scored another black mark). However, the real money flows silently, far out of sight, through channels that you and I would never dream existed. Some of it becomes public, e.g. the $2billion the Saudis “invested” in Mr Jarrad Kushner’s “hedge fund” (I’ll bet he’s sleeping a lot better since daddy got back in the big seat) but most of it doesn’t. Of interest, OpenSecrets shows how much US Senators got from the IZL in 1990-2024. Top of the pops was one Joseph Biden, with well over $4million, and he wasn’t even a senator for twelve of those years (average about $200k each year). Second was Bob Menendez, who was recently convicted of corruption.
So whenever an election comes due in the US (and everywhere else but we’ll talk of the US as it’s bigger and more venal), with each election, the IZL swings into action. Every sitting member and every new candidate is assessed to give a pliability score on how easily they can be swayed. Sitting members who are in the bag as committed Zionist supporters, including lots of far-right people who call themselves Christians but who aren’t, get a lovely visit with lots of flowers and chocolates and a discreet cheque slipped in with the card inviting them to give a talk at a weekend conference at a high-end resort, all expenses covered. “Keep up the good work, dear friend,” say the warmly smiling lobbyists as, with much back-slapping and pumping handshakes, the eager member escorts them down to their limousine, and promises to do exactly that. That night, these candidates sleep the sleep of the just, the just-suborned, knowing that with the IZL behind them, they’re set for life. Eight or ten terms of Congress, a dozen or so company boards in the US-Israel tech industries, a lucrative appointment at a think-tank or two, maybe even an endowed chair at an Ivy League university, honorary degrees, guaranteed pathways for their kids in academia, the military, the financial or high-tech industries … I mean, who could ask for more, who could turn it down?
For new candidates, the routine is similar but the emphasis is different. Each one is visited by a small delegation of “concerned citizens” whose job is to sway the candidate in their direction. The people who do this are very, very experienced, having had lots of training during their many paid trips to Israel. Oozing sincerity from every pore, they deliver their spiel on how important it is to fight antisemitism on every front, support the Israeli outpost of faith, liberty and democracy in a sea of barbarism, what a wonderful job Israelis are doing taming the desert and so on. The message is subtle but clear: “We’re delighted to see you have adopted the moderate and responsible view so we’ll assist you in every possible way. You needn’t worry about campaign finance, we have direct access to the most influential newspapers and media. We can assist with all your publicity material using the most highly experienced agents in the world so that all mention of you in the media is favourable. We can arrange photo shoots with anybody you wish, anywhere and you will never have to worry again.” Most candidates are smart enough to see where this is heading. The day a new representative is elected to Congress, the money-raising starts. Members spend at least 3 hours a day just working the phones to raise money. When somebody walks in and offers to help, very, very few are likely to refuse just because, as born political animals, they rate power higher than they rate integrity.
If the candidate foolishly asks a few sticky questions or even demurs, the pressure ramps up until it becomes overt: “You’re either 100% for us or 100% against us. If you’re on our side, we will look after you. But if you’re against us, we will destroy you. We will turn the country’s entire publicity machine against you, it takes only a few phone calls. We can speak to any editor in the country within two or three minutes, and they’re only too pleased to follow our advice. And yes, we have enough dirt on you to have you put out with the rubbish tomorrow. So think about it, sunshine, but don’t think too long because we need an answer within, say, ten minutes. Remember that if we start the machine, it can’t be turned off, and there’s no second chance. You don’t get a rerun, you can’t appeal to the umpire because we own the umpire. Any questions? Integrity? Don’t talk to us about integrity, we’re about establishing God’s government on earth, this is far more important than your petty bourgeois integrity. And remember the unfortunate Mr Jeremy Corbyn, he imagined he had integrity but we stitched that up. So what’s it to be? You want a future in politics and a comfortable post-political career, or you want to go back to pushing trolleys? Oh, is this a photo of your family on your desk? Lovely kids, do you want them to move up in the world? Or down? Take your pick, but don’t take your time. Don’t worry, dear friend, we’ll just watch the view from your window while you make up your mind.”
People fall for it. Lord Acton said: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Does this mean there are no incorruptible people on earth? No, it does not. What it means is that power attracts the corruptible, the people for whom, beside the searing brilliance of the flaming sword of power, the sputtering lamps of integrity and fairness and generosity of spirit are simply invisible. Power is fascinating, the delight that never palls, but only for the small proportion of people for whom dominating other people is worth more than friendship or esteem; the people whose sense of self-worth comes from and is reinforced by knowing they have power, that they can make others lower their eyes and look away. For the IZL, coming across a genuinely power-hungry budding politician is treasure indeed, putty in their hands to be made into a sword to strike their enemies. They know precisely which buttons to push to bend their quarry to their will, even to make them say, as one did: “I am a Zionist. If Israel didn’t exist, the United States would have to invent it.”
It’s important to remember that the IZL has no interest in converting people it doesn’t like. For them, arguing with people on the opposite side of the fence is a waste of time, not least because they don’t have a case for genocide. All that counts is to make sure its opponents aren’t heard. The Lobby’s role is not to instil favourable opinions in opponents of Zionism but to prevent other people hearing anything that would lead them to form unfavourable views. Only the people it likes get any air time, its enemies are simply silenced, and by any means necessary. In the good old days, simply screeching “antisemitism” would do the trick but since October 7th, that stick has turned into a feather duster. People, especially younger people, are taking the view that if being pro-semitic means supporting genocide, then they’ll wear the antisemitic label with pride. But it’s all based on a lie. One of the main tasks the IZL set itself 75 years ago was to conflate the four themes of Israel, Judaism, Zionism and being of Jewish descent into a single and inviolable socio-politico-religious-racial entity, sanctified for all time by the Holocaust. Opposing one of the themes was to oppose all four, where opposing the Jewish race was the Nazi crime of the century. Thus, by opposing the brutal settler colonial project called Zionism, critics put themselves in the same camp as Himmler and his mates. Most people weren’t prepared to do that, so they simply kept quiet while the Zionists got on with their murderous ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
Some critics, however, aren’t so easily silenced so, as was shown in the American primaries this year, if you kick sand in the face of the IZL, the IZL will arrange for several truck loads of shit to be dumped on your head. The lobby does not take No for an answer because they own the entire US political establishment, and very large chunks in all other western countries. If they have you in their sights, you can kiss your political career goodbye, and probably most other meaningful careers as well. So what sort of shit do they have? The shitty type, the stinking, clingy type of shit that you thought nobody knew about, the sort that every person who lusts after power has hidden in the background, just because that is the nature of people who lust for power (look at Mr Trump’s suggestions for his cabinet). Most of us have things we would rather keep quiet but some, including the politically hungry, have a lot more than others, and the IZL knows it all. So if, perchance, some young candidate for Congress thinks cheering the Israeli war machine while it wipes out the last of the Palestinians is not such a good idea, i.e. s/he puts integrity above power, then a gentle reminder of some past indiscretions will usually pull them into line. If that fails, it’s Goodbye gentle heart, go quietly into that dark night or we’ll cut your balls off and feed them to the cat. It’s called “make them an offer they can’t refuse,” and it is the stock-in-trade of the IZL. And, of course, lots of other spy networks but the IZL have lifted it to the level of a religious duty. The Russian FSB, able successors to the KGB, have piles of “compmat,” compromising material, on one Donald J Trump but it’s thought to be only videos of the portly, naked Trump pissing on giggling prostitutes. Of course the Russian elite know all his financial dealings but something about pots calling kettles black. But, compared with the NSA-Mossad slush troves, it’s a bagatelle.
So we go back to the question I’ve asked of a lot of people: “What is the nature of the steely hold of the Israel lobby over politicians in practically every western country?” Now we know the answer: the entire, international Israel-Zionist lobby is a huge influence peddling machine of the type known to TV addicts as a protection racket: “Gosh, that’s a good job you’ve got in Congress/ Parliament/ university/ wherever, it’d be a real pity if something happened to it, wouldn’t it.” The Zionists have worked out that every lusting, thrusting politician has a price, because for would-be politicians, power and status trump integrity every time (I use the word ‘trump’ advisedly). That’s all it is, just Mafia Studies 101. They even have their own brand of omerta: mentioning the Israel-Zionist lobby is forbidden, which is why nobody will answer my question. But, unsurprisingly, there’s still more to it.
The US could bankrupt Israel with the stroke of a pen or, with a few taps on a keyboard, could leave its vaunted military (“the most moral army in the world”) stranded in the sand or on the runways, so why don’t they? Everybody knows that the way to deal with mafia infiltration is for the citizens to revolt and throw them out. However, politicians won’t join forces to chuck out their major source of income, every one of them is hoping to clean up before the racket is broken open, and none of them is prepared to be the first to speak out in case nobody supports them. There’s that side of it, but that’s politicians, not the elite who actually hold power in the US. For them, the answer to the question “Why do you let this happen?” is one word: oil. It suits the US 1% to have Israel causing ceaseless havoc in the Middle East because oil, although it isn’t clear they actually know why. Bearing in mind that the US invented Israel in 1948, why did Biden say that if it didn’t exist, they would have to invent it? Surely, if Israel were either not there or actually acted like a civilised country and got on with its neighbours, the US could do just as well financially? Perhaps they should bone up on Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Imperial Japan decided to boot the whiteys out of East Asia and run the show to suit themselves. It didn’t go well but by the 1970s, they had peacefully achieved everything they could possibly have achieved with their murderous rampages through a dozen countries, and they had friends.
The answer to that question, I suggest, lies in South America. The US dominates Latin America, mostly for the worse but never confidently. One would think that the example of North American prosperity would be enough to encourage the Latins to copy their example but it doesn’t work like that. The US can’t handle competition. It doesn’t treat the Southern continent like one of its states, they don’t trust Latins to do as they’re told, so it holds the entire region in a stranglehold, with two goals. The first is to keep Latin America supine while US companies loot the place, and the second is to make sure that none of them get ideas above their station and decides to pursue an independent policy. Standard American procedure is to use the local elite to keep the peons in their place. The elite are bribed in a variety of ways and this works fine until they get too greedy. Then trouble brews, so the local military, whose officers have all been trained in the US, are prodded into staging a coup. If the military is too small or incompetent, a quick invasion usually settles the matter. If that doesn’t work (see Bay of Pigs), then the country is strangled. Cuba is the living, barely-breathing case demonstration of what will happen if Latins get too smart and want to boot out the gringos. Similarly, Chile’s Allende and Venezuela under Chavez decided to test the limits and found out the hard way. Why would they want to be independent? Because ordinary folk are sick of being robbed blind while they’re held down by the Yankee boot on their throats.
This is the model of the policy the US has pursued in the Middle East since the 1945 Bitter Lake agreement with Saudi Arabia over pricing oil in US dollars. In order to prevent its tame monarchies being overthrown, as happened in Iraq and Iran, the US provides massive support to the Gulf monarchies while overlooking their breathtaking corruption and brutal suppression of human rights. In return, the monarchies allow US companies free access to their oil, allow military bases, and buy heaps of American weapons, US treasuries, real estate, stocks, etc, as well as “donating” to US political parties and sitting members. It all goes back to the US having no idea how to relate to other countries on a basis of equality and respect (see Substack Narcisso-Fascism Jan. 9th 2025). All Americans want to be rich, it’s like a religion to them, but the only way they know is by stiffing other people. In particular, they can’t treat brown people as equals, they can’t not smack coloured people around. This policy would be fine except for the small point that brown (and black, and yellow) people don’t like being treated as inferior for precisely the same reason Americans and British and French and everybody else don’t like it: the paradox of hierarchy. The other side of the human drive to dominate is the drive to avoid being dominated. Despite all its high-sounding talk about democracy and freedom and international rules and all that tosh, America is doing nothing in the Middle East that snapping and snarling curs in the street don’t do while sorting out which one is top dog. And for the same reason: the blind, hormonally-driven urge to get to the top and smash the competition.
Israel’s role in all of this is as the rabid attack dog that will savage any Arab state that dares to think it might like a more independent policy than the one sent them every few years by the Arab desk in Foggy Bottom. By attacking upstart Arab countries on behalf of its patron, Israel routinely gets away with theft, plunder and ethnic cleansing, including the murder of maybe hundreds of thousands of women and children. It is the reason they get the bombs and planes they ask for, why they can spray white phosphorus over civilian areas or rain one-tonne bombs on schools and hospitals crammed with refugees. Israel laughs while incinerating hospital patients in their beds just because periodically, it suits the US to unleash an insane, nuclear-armed hellhound to terrorise the neighbourhood into toeing the American line. This is why Israelis feel free to drive civilians from their ancestral homes, to bulldoze all traces of the village into the dirt and erase the names from maps, then to starve their descendants. Partly it is because they have practically the whole of the Western political class in what is called the squirrel grip, but also as Uncle Sam’s enforcer, they can act out their grandiose religious delusions knowing there will be no repercussions (the fact that there are no repercussions serves to convince them that god is truly on their side). Zionists who don’t have any religious beliefs needn’t feel left out, they can simply join in for the sheer joy of killing human beings whose colour and religion and language and culture they don’t like.
The collective political class and half the population of Israel have actually gone mad. They are caught in a vast, shared paranoid delusional system in which they believe some god their illiterate ancestors dreamed up thousands of years ago has anointed them as his “chosen people” and promised them a stretch of dirt where they can murder the inhabitants, stone adulterers and bludgeon faggots to death. This is not madness in the usual sense of a person suffering delusions and hallucinations who fears them and has no control over them, but a delusion joyously embraced just because it promises them what they want: land, power, impunity. This false belief is welded into their entire perception of self and universe; everything they believe stems from it; every fact is subordinate to it.
They forget that in the story, the deal was actually a covenant, a contract between two parties, God (aka Yahweh) on one side and The Children of Israel on the other. After trudging through the desert for forty years, God sent an Archangel who, after the usual fanfare, announced: “I’m here to tell you that God will give you this land…” At that point, the assembled Children of Israel exploded in a delirium of singing, cheering and laughing, hugging each other and dancing around with their children or throwing them joyously in the air. We’re made, they yelled to each other, a place of our own where we can kick the stinking goy up the arse and make them eat our shit. Thanks, Gabe mate, love ya. OK everybody, grab your kids and tents and donkeys and your swords and we’ll get stuck into clearing out the trash who thought they owned our land. Thanks again Yahweh, and don’t you worry, we’ll certainly be worshipping you from now on.
In the hubbub, they didn’t hear the last bit of the Archangel’s proclamation. If they had, they wouldn’t have been so excited because it said “I will give you this land if you keep my law.” Law No. 10 says “ Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.” That definitely includes Palestinian land. Law No. 6 says simply: “Thou shalt not kill.” Disappointing as it may seem, that extends to killing Palestinians. Non-Jews therefore need not be taken in by the Big Lie that Jews have some sort of claim on Palestinian land. By any reasonable interpretation, all religious or traditional or historical or moral claims Israelis and their Zionist supporters may feel they have on Palestinian lives and/or property are void. They are void by virtue of the unspeakable immoral acts of the entire Israeli-Zionist project which totally breach every known principle of human rights but also because it destroys the spirit of their mythical covenant. Plus the deal is void by adverse possession, not to mention that rule about never believing self-gratifying fairy stories.
Cue the usual “gotcha” question: “Do you deny Israel’s right to exist?” The answer is curt: No state has a right to exist. States come, and states go, only the people are a constant. People have a right to exist but administrative arrangements can be and regularly are changed at the stroke of a pen. Israel was created by human decisions and it can be dissolved again by the same means.
So we go back to the question behind all this: What drives this inhuman behaviour in people who claim to be followers of The Book? We know the answer: It is simply the universal human lust to dominate and control The Other. It has nothing to do with whether gods exist or what one of them may have said from a bush burning in the desert thousands of years ago, nothing to do with morality or justice or fairness or Nazis or October 7th. It has everything to do with the blind, unreasoning, hormonally driven and therefore insatiable human drive to crush and destroy and stand exultant over the corpses of another tribe, to steal their land and cattle and enslave their women and children, as enshrined in the Old Testament. Any divine authority was an afterthought, a post hoc justification for what they wanted to do anyway. It was their attempt to justify what they are still doing today, even though the very angels themselves are weeping as the tortured children of Gaza are laid to rest in the caring embrace of the soil of their mother country.
In his Devil’s Dictionary, the eccentric essayist Ambrose Bierce offered this definition:
Manna: A food miraculously given to the Israelites in the wilderness. When it was no longer supplied to them, they settled down and tilled the soil, fertilizing it, as a rule, with the bodies of the original inhabitants.
Nothing has changed. After a break of a few thousand years, they’re at it again.
What goes around comes around. One day, somebody will do to the Israelis what they are now doing to the Palestinians. And just as today, where the world sits in their living rooms, sipping their shiraz or nibbling a chocolate, briefly watching on widescreen TV as Israel massacres its defenceless neighbours before flicking to the football, then, on that dreadful day of vengeance when terrified Zionists scream for help for their burned and broken children, none will come.